A useful 56 page handbook for separated parents that provides insight into what children typically experience during a separation process and advice on how to communicate with them during this difficult time.
In this handbook you’ll find information on the process of becoming a separated parent, how it can affect you and your children, and how to change things for the better. It may seem like a lot to ask, but doing only one thing differently could lead to a whole range of possibilities that you never imagined could happen.
This handbook can be read alongside the ‘Separated Parents Information Programme’ or alongside one-to-one parent information meetings. The information is taken from a wide range of research into parenting after divorce or separation. It is divided into different parts that follow the legal, financial, parenting and emotional aspects of your divorce or separation. Each section has a different colour scheme so you can easily find the one you want.
When you go through separation as a parent, it’s a little like starting a journey that you never intended to go on. When you’re in a relationship, you have hopes for the future. Separating from your partner means that there is a loss of those hopes and expectations and you don’t know the direction your life will go in.
Your children will be shaped very much by how their parents behave towards them about the loss and how they behave towards each other. Important decisions such as where your child or children will live, and how often they see each parent will of course affect them, and so will the level of conflict between you and your ex partner. You may not think or feel as if you have any influence over the level of conflict and that it just happens. However, as you read this book, we hope that you’ll see that each parent, regardless of who is felt to be provoking conflict or not, can manage it so it is less harmful to their children. This book and the course it is part of is designed to give some ideas for how to manage disagreements and high emotions that happen between separated parents. Similarly they point out ways to help children manage their feelings and reactions to being children of separation.
Although the process of adjusting to being a separated parent will at some point come to an end, your journey through life with your children does not. The main change that has happened for you as a parent is in the relationship with your ex-partner. The change from being intimate partners to being parents with a businesslike relationship might feel like an uphill struggle, but you can use this handbook to point you in the right direction.
Though there may be parts of the process that you can’t influence or change, you may take comfort in the fact that in the end you will have received some ideas for coping with the difficulties you face. For, if you can take even small steps now, you are at the beginning of the new voyage for yourself and your children.
